Riddles With No Answers: Textual Variances in Through the Looking-glass

In Through the Looking-glass, by Lewis Carroll

In the chapter titled, “Queen Alice”, Alice is sitting with the Red and White Queens engaged in an absurd conversation. The Red Queen continues to lecture and moralize and ask silly questions of Alice. Eventually, Alice wearies of any attempts to make sense out of the Red Queen’s madness. In most common additions of the book, the text reads as follows:

Alice sighed and gave it up. 'It's exactly like a riddle with no answer!' she thought.

Note the indefinite article accompanying “riddle”.

However, my Norton Critical Edition with the supposed authoritative text reads as follows:

Alice sighed and gave it up. 'It's exactly like the riddle with no answer!' she thought.

Note the definite article accompanying “riddle”.

So we have two versions of the text. Which is correct? This is not a small matter of textual variance because there could be an important link to the previous Alice book, Alice in Wonderland.

In chapter 7 of that book, titled, “A Mad Tea-Party”, Alice is sitting with the Mad Hatter, March Hare, and Dormouse, engaged in an absurd conversation. The text reads:

The Hatter opened his eyes very wide on hearing this; but all he said was, 'Why is a raven like a writing-desk?'

…

'No, I give it up,' Alice replied: 'what's the answer?'

'I haven't the slightest idea,' said the Hatter.

…

Alice sighed wearily. 'I think you might do something better with the time,' she said, 'than waste it in asking riddles that have no answers.'

As you can surmise, if, in Through the Looking-glass, Alice actually used the definite article then it highly indicates that she is thinking about the Mad Hatter’s Riddle at this point. If she used the indefinite article then we have her thinking of no such riddle in particular.

The annotated editions of Alice that I’ve read have all drawn the connection between Alice’s statement in Through the Looking-glass and the Mad Hatter’s Riddle, even when the text these annotated editions are using contain the indefinite article. The editions usually state that the Mad Hatter’s Riddle is an example of a riddle with no answer.

And all these annotated editions use texts lacking the definite article. In fact, I’ve only been able to find one edition of Through the Looking-glass that includes the definite article in the text: the Norton Critical Edition, both the 1971 and 1992 editions of this book.

Therefore, because I hold the Norton Critical Editions to a high standard, because I deem a scholarly and authoritative edition to be a superior reference to that of any so-called “standard” edition, and because I believe that Carroll was quite conscious of the connection he was making between his two Alice books in this section, I must conclude that most editions of Through the Looking-glass are in error at this point and only the Norton Critical Editions offer an accurate version of Lewis Carroll’s true literary intention.